This semester, I’m coteaching a graduate/advanced-undergraduate level course in biostatistics and experimental design. This is my lecture on how to present statistical results, when writing up a study. It’s a topic I’ve written about before, and what I presented in class draws on several older blog posts here at Scientist Sees Squirrel. However, I thought it would be useful to pull this together into a single (longish) post, with my slides to illustrate it. If you’d like to use any of these slides, here’s the Powerpoint – licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

I’ve just published a paper that had some trouble getting through peer review. Nothing terribly unusual about that, of course, and the paper is better for its birthing pains. But one reviewer comment (made independently, actually, by several different reviewers) really bugged me. It revealed some fuzzy thinking that’s all too common amongst ecologists, having to do with the value of quick-and-dirty methods. Quick-and-dirty methods deserve more respect. I’ll explain using my particular paper as an example, first, and then provide a general analysis. Continue reading →

Graphic: A fake regression. You knew those were fake data, right? I may spend my entire career without getting a real regression that tight.

If you clicked on this post out of horror, let me assure you, first off, that it isn’t quite what you fear. I don’t – of course – endorse faking data for publication. That happens, and I agree it’s a Very Bad Thing, but it isn’t what’s on my mind today.

What I do endorse, and in fact encourage, is faking data for understanding. Fake data (maybe “toy data” would be a better term) can help us understand real data, and in my experience this is a tool that’s underused. Continue reading →

If you’re like me, you’re continually frustrated by the fact that undergraduate students struggle to understand statistics. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: a large fraction of undergraduates simply refuse to understand statistics; mention a requirement for statistical data analysis in your course and you’ll get eye-rolling, groans, or (if it’s early enough in the semester) a rash of course-dropping.

This bothers me, because we can’t do inference in science without statistics*. Why are students so unreceptive to something so important? Continue reading →

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